War, economic collapse, and personal devastation await Americans
no matter who they vote for - and what we should do instead.

By Tony Cartalucci

August 25,
2012 "Information
Clearing House" ----
A vote for Obama will bring war with Syria, Iran, and eventually
Russia and China. The economy will continue to suffer in order
to bolster the interests of off-shore corporate-financier
interests, while the collective prospects of Americans continue
to whither and blow away. A vote for Romney, however, will also
bring war with Syria, Iran, and eventually Russia and China. The
economy will also continue to suffer in order to bolster the
interests of off-shore corporate-financier interests, while the
collective prospects of Americans continue to whither and blow
away. Why?

Because the White House is but a public relations front
for the corporate-financier interests of Wall Street and London.
A change of residence at the White House is no different than
say, British Petroleum replacing its spokesman to superficially
placate public opinion when in reality the exact same board of
directors, overall agenda, and objectives remain firmly in
place. Public perception then is managed by, not the primary
motivation of, corporate-financier interests.

It is the absolute folly to believe that multi-billion dollar
corporate-financier interests would subject their collective
fate to the whims of the ignorant, uninformed, and essentially
powerless voting masses every four years. Instead, what plays
out every four years is theater designed to give the general
public the illusion that they have some means of addressing
their grievances without actually ever changing the prevailing
balance of power in any meaningful way.

The foreign policy of both Obama and Romney is written by the
exact same corporate-financier funded think-tanks that have
written the script for America's destiny for the last several
decades.

Bush = Obama = Romney

As was previously reported, while the corporate media focuses on
non-issues, and political pundits accentuate petty political
rivalries between the "left" and the "right," a look deeper into
presidential cabinets and the authors of domestic and foreign
policy reveals just how accurate the equation of "Bush = Obama =
Romney" is.

Image: Professional spokesmen, representative not of
the American people but of Fortune 500 multinational
corporations and banks. Since the time of JP Morgan 100 years
ago, the corporate-financier elite saw themselves as being above
government, and national sovereignty as merely a regulatory
obstacle they could lobby, bribe, and manipulate out of
existence. In the past 100 years, the monied elite have gone
from manipulating the presidency to now reducing the office to a
public relations functionary of their collective interests.

George Bush's cabinet consisted of representatives from FedEx,
Boeing, the Council on Foreign Relations, big-oil's
Belfer Center at Harvard, the Center for Strategic and
International Studies (CSIS), Circuit City, Verizon, Cerberus
Capital Management, Goldman Sachs, and the RAND Corporation,
among many others.

Image:
The Henry Jackson Society is just one of many Neo-Conservative
think-tanks, featuring many of the same people and of course,
the same corporate sponsors. Each think-tank puts on a different
public face and focuses on different areas of specialty despite
harboring the same "experts" and corporate sponsors.

....

His foreign policy was overtly dictated by "Neo-Conservatives"
including Richard Perle, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Jeane
Kirkpatrick, Paul Wolfowitz, James Woolsey, Richard Armitage,
Zalmay Khalilzad, Elliot Abrams, Frank Gaffney, Eliot Cohen,
John Bolton, Robert Kagan, Francis Fukuyama, William Kristol,
and Max Boot - all of whom hold memberships within a myriad of
Fortune 500-funded think-tanks that to this day still direct US
foreign policy - even under a "liberal" president. These include
the Brookings Institution, the International Crisis Group, the
Foreign Policy Initiative, the Henry Jackson Society, the
Council on Foreign Relations, and many more.

Image:
A visual representation of some of the Brookings
Institution's corporate sponsors. Brookings is by no
means an exception, but rather represents the incestuous
relationship between US foreign and domestic policy
making and the Fortune 500 found in every major
"think-tank." Elected US representatives charged with
legislative duties, merely rubber stamp the papers and
policies drawn up in these think-tanks.

....

Obama's
cabinet likewise features representatives from JP Morgan,
Goldman Sachs, the Council on Foreign Relations, Fortune 500
representatives Covington and Burling, Citi Group, Freedie Mac,
and defense contractor Honeywell. Like Bush's cabinet, foreign
policy is not penned by Obama sitting behind his desk in the
Oval Office, but rather by the very same think-tanks that
directed Bush's presidency including the Council on Foreign
Relations, RAND Corporation, the Brookings Institution, the
International Crisis Group, and the Chatham House. There are
also a myriad of smaller groups consisting of many of the same
members and corporate sponsors, but who specialize in certain
areas of interest.

Image:
Obama, not a Marxist. A visual representation of current US
President Barack Obama's cabinet's corporate-financier ties past
and present. As can be plainly seen, many of the same
corporate-financier interests represented in Obama's
administration were also represented in Bush's administration.

And
with Mitt Romney, "running for president" against Obama in 2012,
we see already
his foreign policy advisers, Michael Chertoff, Eliot Cohen,
Paula Dobrainsky, Eric Edelman, and Robert Kagan, represent the
exact same people and corporate-funded think-tanks devising
strategy under both President Bush and President Obama.

While Presidents Bush and Obama attempted to portray the West's
global military expansion as a series of spontaneous crises, in
reality,
since at least as early as 1991, the nations of Iraq, Iran,
Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Sudan, Somalia, and many others that
previously fell under the Soviet Union's sphere of influence,
were slated either for political destabilization and overthrow,
or overt military intervention. While the public was fed various
narratives explaining why Bush conducted two wars within the
greater
global "War on Terror," and why Obama eagerly expanded these
wars while starting new ones in Libya and now Syria, in reality
we are seeing "continuity of agenda," dictated by
corporate-financier elite, rubber stamped by our elected
representatives, and peddled to us by our "leaders," who in
reality are nothing more than spokesmen for the collective
interests of the Fortune 500.

Image:
The International Crisis Group's corporate sponsors reveal a
pattern of mega-multinationals intertwined with not only
creating and directing US, and even European foreign policy, but
in carrying it out.
ICG trustee Kofi Annan is in Syria now
carrying out a ploy to buy time for NATO-backed terrorists
so they can be rearmed, reorganized, and redeployed against the
Syrian government for another Western-backed attempt at regime
change - all done under the guise of promoting "peace."

No
matter who you vote for in 2012 - until we change the balance of
power currently tipped in favor of the Fortune 500, fed daily by
our money, time, energy, and attention, nothing will change but
the rhetoric with which this singular agenda is sold to the
public. Romney would continue exactly where Obama left off, just
as Obama continued exactly where Bush left off. And even during
the presidencies of Bill Clinton and Bush Sr., it was the same
agenda meted out by the same corporate-financier interests that
have been driving American, and increasingly Western destiny,
since US Marine General Smedley Butler wrote "War
is a Racket" in 1935.

What Should We Do About It?

1. Boycott the Presidential Election: The first immediate
course of action when faced with a fraudulent system is to
entirely disassociate ourselves from it, lest we grant it
unwarranted legitimacy. Boycotting the farcical US elections
would not impede the corporate-financier "selection" process and
the theatrical absurdity that accompanies it, but dismal voter
turnout would highlight the illegitimacy of the system. This in
many ways has already happened, with voter turnout in 2008 a
mere 63%, meaning that only 32% of America's eligible voters
actually voted for Obama, with even fewer voting for runner-up
John McCain.

Ensuring that this mandate is even lower in 2012 - regardless of
which PR man gets selected, and then highlighting the
illegitimacy of both the elections and the system itself is the
first step toward finding a tenable solution. People must divest
from dead-ends. Presidential elections are just one such
dead-end.

Focusing on local elections and governance first, not only
emphasizes the primacy of local self-determination, but affords
us a grassroots-up approach to transforming our communities, and
collectively our nation back into something truly representative
of the people.

2. Boycott and Replace the Corporate Oligarchy: The
corporate-financier interests that dominate Western
civilization did not spring up overnight. It is through
generations of patronage that we the people have granted these
corporate-financier interests the unwarranted influence they now
enjoy. And today, each day, we collectively turn in our
paychecks to the global "company store," providing the summation
of our toil as fuel for this oligarchy's perpetuation.

By boycotting the goods, services, and institutions of this
oligarchy, we steal the fire out from under the proverbial
cauldron - the very source of the current paradigm's power.
While it is impractical to commit overnight to a full-spectrum
boycott, we can begin immediately by entirely boycotting
corporations
like Coca-Cola and Pepsi, Kraft, Unilever and others by
simply supporting local businesses and our local farmers market.
This "voting with one's wallet" is a form of democracy that
unlike elections, will undoubtedly shift the balance of power
toward a system more representative of the people's interests.

By creating
self-reliant communities independent of the machinations of
corporate-financier interests, we provide ourselves with the
greatest form of insurance against instability and uncertainty -
an insurance policy placed solely in our own hands.

3. Get Educated, Get Organized: Leveraging
technology is a necessary step in eliminating dependency on
other corporate-financier interests - such as big oil, big
defense, big-agri, big-pharma, and the telecom monopolies. To
leverage technology, people at a grassroots level must get
organized, educate themselves, and collaborate to create local
business models and solutions to systematically replace large
multinational holdings.

A recent interview by geopolitical analyst Eric Draitser
with Seth Rutledge, featured on Stop Imperialism, explored
the possibilities of developing local broadband networks.
Community spaces dedicated to technological education,
collaboration, and resource pooling are also an emerging
phenomenon. Called "maker spaces" or sometimes "hacker spaces,"
these grassroots initiatives serve as incubators for innovative,
local small businesses.

Technology will eventually provide solutions to problems
generally "solved" by government subsidies. Medicare, for
instance, is a government subsidy to address the expenses and
subsequent inaccessibility of medical care. Medical care, in
turn, is expensive because the means to provide it are scarce.
The supply of doctors, hospitals, treatments, biomedical
technology, and many other aspects of modern health
infrastructure are vastly outnumbered by demand.

Until technology can better balance this equation, people must
organize to either defend as temporary stopgap measures,
national programs that provide care to those who can't afford
it, or create local alternatives. To cut programs people depend
on for the sake of saving an economy plundered by special
interests, to specifically preserve these same special interests
is unconscionable.

An organized political front that demands the
preservation/reformation of these programs as well as investment
in the development of permanent technological solutions, needs
not pass the hat around to the working or even productive
entrepreneurial classes of society, but rather level taxes on
parasitic financial speculation and market manipulation - thus
solving two problems in a single stroke. Geopolitical analyst
and historian Dr. Webster Tarpley has already enumerated such an
approach in his
5 point plan
for international economic recovery (.pdf) by specifically
calling for resistance to austerity and a 1% Wall Street tax.

Conclusion

Undoubtedly people realize something is wrong, and that
something needs to be done. To ensure that the
corporate-financier elite remain in perpetual power, a myriad of
false solutions have been contrived or created out of co-opted
movements, to indefinitely steer people away from influencing
the current balance of power and achieving true
self-determination.

By recognizing this and seizing the reins of our own destiny, we
can and must change the current balance of power. In the process
of doing so, we must recognize and resist attempts to derail and
distract us by way of the incessant political minutia now on
full display during the 2012 US Presidential Election. For every
problem faced by society, there is a permanent, technological
solution. For hunger there was agriculture, for lack of shelter,
there was architecture, and no matter how daunting today's
problems may seem, there lies similar solutions.

We must realize that by endeavoring to solve these problems, we
jeopardize monopolies as insidious as they are monolithic,
constructed to exploit such problems. If we fail to recognize
and undermine these interests through pragmatic activism, we
will be resigned to whatever fate these special interests
determine for us, no matter how cleverly they sell us this fate
as one of our own choosing.

In accordance
with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material
is distributed without profit to those who have
expressed a prior interest in receiving the
included information for research and educational
purposes. Information Clearing House has no
affiliation whatsoever with the originator of
this article nor is Information ClearingHouse
endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)